James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  The Jefferson administration, and Madison, also suffered from the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Chief Justice Marshall, who served as the sole arbiter at the trial, ruled that the prosecution had to prove in its case that Burr had actually started a physical movement to overthrow the government, not that he planned to do so. The trial ended in an acquittal for Burr. A large group of angry residents in Baltimore stuffed dummies of Marshall, Burr, and others into a cart one night and drove them down a dirt road to a gallows and hung them in effigy.24

  Most Americans were certain that Burr was a villain. “Burr's party fights hard, but it is the general conviction that he will be convicted,” wrote Dolley Madison of the man who introduced her to her husband, who added that he was “evil.”25

  There were unhappy Federalists who might have supported Madison but changed their minds. “We found ourselves insulted and maltreated by all and perceived no assurance on which we could confidently rely that the political system which has been adopted would be changed by any of them [Republicans]. The superior talents of Mr. Madison would probably have placed us in his scale had not recent events induced the opinion that his prejudices with respect to our foreign relations were still…incurable,” wrote John Marshall just before the election.26

  The growing feud between the United States and Great Britain, fueled by the 1807 British attack on the American frigate USS Chesapeake, which killed or wounded twenty-one sailors, also turned public opinion against Madison, who handled all the dreadful negotiations with the recalcitrant and unrepentant British as secretary of state.

  Congressmen were livid over the bombardment of the Chesapeake. “The conduct of Humphries, the captain of the Leopard, in attacking the Chesapeake was…an assault upon our sovereignty,” said Congressman William Plumer, who added that the United States should have declared war on Britain right after the first shot was fired.27 Many agreed with him. Right after the attack of the ship, several thousand residents of Baltimore signed up for local militia companies and began military drills, held parades, and were reviewed by local officials. “The attack on the Chesapeake, while it excited the indignation, awoke also the slumbering military spirit of the country,” wrote the angry editor of the Washington Federalist.28

  Many avid Republicans did not think that Jefferson or Madison were radical enough in their policies and that the Jefferson administration, and prospective Madison government, had turned from champions of states’ rights into just another branch of the nationalistic, big-government Federalist Party.

  Madison suffered because he followed Jefferson into the White House. The flamboyant and often-charming Jefferson was quite popular. He possessed a charismatic personality, was always at home in social settings, and was a brilliant writer. Madison still had a difficult time mingling socially, struggled through parties, and was a mundane writer. Jefferson took stands and never backed down from them; Madison always seemed to be reassessing his position and looking for the middle ground in any dispute. And Madison, upon becoming president, was still finding it difficult, despite his wife's ceaseless work to reframe his image, to shed his dour personality in public and to improve on his quiet, unmoving speaking voice. His wonderful demeanor in private, admired by all, and sure handling of policy, remained hidden from the great masses. Madison insisted that he could not be someone whom he was not; his aides and wife assured him that he could be. Wasn't that a brutal definition of politics?

  And Madison could not understand why he did not have the support of all the people. He wrote in 1787 that “all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”29 But, when people distrusted him as secretary of state and president because of his power, he did not understand their feelings and was demoralized.

  He understood, though, that he was never going to be judged fairly by Federalist newspapers, just as he was never going to be criticized by Republican papers. The opposing parties controlled their newspapers, and politicians of all parties knew the kind of coverage they would get in each journal. “Could it be so arranged, that every newspaper when printed on one side should be handed over to the press of an adversary to be printed on the other; thus presenting to every reader both sides of every question, truth would always have a fair chance,” he wrote.30 He knew that he, like every other president, simply had to live with the press, whether it was friend or foe.

  The Federalist press continually sniped at him during the presidential campaign. Editors wrote columns against him, and numerous anti-Madison letters to the editor were printed. Anybody who ever had an unhappy business transaction with Madison somehow scribbled a letter that found its way into the papers.

  Madison had problems in his own party, too. Ever since the birth of the Republican Party, longtime, devoted members found fault with Jefferson and Madison as they slowly moved away, they charged, from rock-solid Republican principals of states’ rights, individual freedom, and small government. Their number did not grow until Jefferson's second term, so the leaders of the group found in Madison's election hopes a wide target at which to level criticism. Even people in Madison's home state, Virginia, such as the highly respected judge from Virginia, Edmund Pendleton, opposed him.31

  Madison's friend the president countermanded all of them, though, with a brilliant idea. He had all of Madison's official papers read in Congress, a job that took six long days. Republican newspapers then printed some of the speeches and, especially, the letters. Jefferson gave the country a never-before-seen view of behind-the-scenes workings at the secretary of state's office. The secretary shone in the papers. He exhibited a genuine grasp not just of his office but also of the workings of the entire federal government. The papers showed him as a good boss, a fine negotiator, and a partner to the president. Most of all, though, they showed that he was tough. He was tough with the British and the Spaniards, and he was especially tough with Napoleon Bonaparte. The people liked that.

  For example, at the beginning of 1809 he sent a lengthy report to the president, which was leaked to the press and widely reprinted, in which he listed the insults and outrages of Great Britain against America and bluntly said they were “belligerent decrees, orders, and proclamations.” More than anything else, the public readings of the papers enabled Madison to become president.32

  The unpopular embargo, which should have hurt his chances to be elected, did not. Opposition to the embargo was strongest in New England, and New England was dominated by the Federalists anyway, so it made little difference in the vote there. In the end, too, the embargo was neutralized as an issue because enough Americans supported it or at least put up with it, in different regions to overcome its enemies in New England.

  But there was another factor that was overlooked at the time. James Madison and his wife, Dolley, had become political animals. Madison was a good listener. One of the momentous moments of his life was listening to George Washington tell him in the winter of 1788 that he had to put aside political theory and get his hands dirty with rough-and-tumble politics if he wanted to succeed in the political world. He did that. In the first Congresses, he was a major dealmaker. During Jefferson's election as president in 1800, he had served on the main election committee and provided Jefferson and others with state-by-state, city-by-city, and even town-by-town vote totals and analysis that he demanded from local political leaders. Madison did the same with various gubernatorial races a few months later. He had given Jefferson probably the best analysis of why he was elected president by the Congress. He knew how politics worked, and so did his wife. In 1808 and 1809, the pair put all of their skills to work to map out a successful election campaign.33

  George Clinton, ill, stayed at home and campaigned very little. Pinckney, who did not even know he might be a candidate until he was nominated, began his campaign in a burst of enthusiasm, rallying the party faithful and reminding all that the Federalists were the first party and a good one. “The spirit of Federalism which is bursting forth
to the north and east of the Susquehanna must have an advantageous effect on our public affairs,” he said, but he lost his energy as numerous groups of his own Federalists criticized him and abandoned him during the fall. Pinckney also had little support outside of his own region of the country.34

  The election of the president by the Electoral College, held publicly then in Congress, was an elegant affair. Spectators jammed the House of Representatives chamber in Washington for the counting of the electoral ballots in a two-hour-long meeting. Madison won, gaining most of his strength from the South and the West plus New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. He had 122 votes. George Clinton had 6, and Charles Pinckney had 47. It was a surprisingly easy victory. He was proclaimed officially as the President-elect, and his wife, Dolley—her friends bragged everywhere,—was the “Queen-elect.”

  Their friends were pleased. Eliza Collins Lee wrote Dolley that “you are about to fulfill a character the most dignified and respectable in society…. I feel no small degree of exultation in knowing that the mind, temper and manners of my Philadelphia Quaker friend are peculiarly fitted for the station, where hospitality and graciousness of deportment will appear conspicuously charming and conciliating.”35

  One thing Madison did worry about as the new president was the power of public opinion and the people in America, a country that was practically doubling in population every ten years (3.699 million residents in 1790, the year of the first census). “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained…the more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty,” he wrote earlier, in 1791, and he believed it more fervently when he was elected to the nation's highest office.36

  He remembered, too, that regardless of his high office of president, his eight years as secretary of state, and his many terms in Congress, he was, at heart, a rebel. “Every nation has a right to abolish an old government and establish a new one. This principle is not only recorded in every public archive, written in every American heart, and sealed with the blood of a host of American martyrs, but is the only lawful tenure by which the United States hold their existence as a nation,” he firmly believed.37

  He was now finally in charge of a government he had designed in 1787, and a government that he saw as the pride of the world. He had written in a newspaper column that the United States was “a government deriving its energy from the will of the society and operating by the reason of its measures, on the understanding and interest of the society. Such is the government for which philosophy has been searching and humanity been sighing, from the most remote ages. Such are the republican governments which it is the glory of America to have invented and her unrivalled happiness to possess.”38

  He later told the marquis de Lafayette, whom he had befriended during the American Revolution, that the strength of the US democracy was its system of checks and balances: “A government like ours has so many safety valves, giving vent to overheated passions, that it carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human institutions cannot be exempt.”39

  Madison was not a powerful speaker. In his inaugural address, he told the packed crowd at the House of Representatives that he sought neutrality in foreign relations (he and all others had remembered how Washington had steered the United States away from a war in Europe with a neutrality proclamation ten years before) and prosperity at home. In one long-winded sentence, he told the gathering, too, that he wanted to

  foster a spirit of independence too just to invade the rights of others, too proud to surrender our own, too liberal to indulge unworthy prejudices ourselves and too elevated not to look down upon them in others; to hold the union of the states as the basis of their peace and happiness…to respect the rights and authorities reserved to the states and to the people as equally incorporated with and essential to the success of the general system…to promote by authorized means improvements friendly to agriculture, to manufactures and to external as well as internal commerce.40

  He also promised freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and aid to Native Americans.

  Hundreds of people met the Madisons at their home (Jefferson was still living in the White House) following his swearing in at the Capitol. The house was packed. The chilly streets outside were filled with elegant horse-drawn carriages, well-dressed men on horseback, and thousands of people walking on foot from all over town. Inside the Madisons’ home, every room was filled with people, as were the wide, high hallways and the sprawling lawn both in front and in back of the building. The president and Mrs. Madison met all of their well-wishers on a lengthy receiving line. All were glad to meet the new president, who greeted them in his soft voice, and were very happy to meet the effervescent Dolley. “She looked extremely beautiful,” wrote Margaret Smith. “[She] was dressed in a plain cambric dress with a very long train, plain round the neck without any handkerchief, and beautiful bonnet of purple velvet and white satin with white plumes. She was all dignity, grace and affability.”41

  That night, in yet another precedent-setting change, the first inaugural ball in Washington was held as a formal activity at the new, large Long's Hotel in the downtown area of the city. Over four hundred dignitaries and local residents attended. Mr. Madison arrived a bit late with Dolley on his arm. She was radiant in a long gown of yellow velvet, her neck and arms adorned in pearls. She wore a turban on her head with an outrageous bird-of-paradise plume sticking out of it. All eyes were on her as she entered and the orchestra played. “She looked like a queen…dignity, sweetness, grace,” wrote a woman there.42

  Dolley stood out, as she always did, but now, in the winter of 1809, there were far more well-dressed women in Washington than there had been when she arrived in town in 1801. There were many more women's clothing stores in Washington and the nearby towns, and newspapers now wrote about ladies’ fashion, and Dolley's example had spurred many women to dress up. No one had to fear criticism for opulence; after all, the First Lady dressed that way.

  The hall in the hotel where the inaugural ball was held was overheated, and the temperature rose as more and more guests arrived. Everybody at the ball began to get uncomfortable. There did not seem to be a way to drop the temperature, so the clerks finally broke the glass windows to permit air to flow in from the capital's night sky. After that, the guests breathed easier and danced all night.

  While the inaugural ball did wonders for Dolley's reputation, as did everything, it hurt the new president's image. The ballroom of the hotel was very crowded, and the short Madison often became lost in the crowd. He was trying to draw attention and had to contend with the dynamic Jefferson, there at the ball to say good-bye to everyone. And Madison, working all day on his inaugural address; delivering it; and then spending the rest of the day with receptions, celebrations, and parties, was tired. Even his friends frowned on his appearance. Margaret Bayard Smith said he looked “spiritless and exhausted” and added that he “looked as if could scarcely stand.”43 He told all around him that he wished he could go to bed. And he did. He and his wife left the party while the revelers continued to dance and drink—and talk about the new president's very early departure.

  Madison could not, at first, escape withering criticism from some, even supposed “friends.” Frances Few, Albert Gallatin's sister-in-law, scalded Madison when he took office. “Mr. Madison, the President-elect, is a small man quite devoid of dignity in his appearance—he bows very low and never looks at the person to whom he is bowing but keeps his eyes on the ground. His skin looks like parchment—at first I thought his appearance was occasioned by the small pox,” she said.44 Alexander Dick wrote that President Madison was “a very small man…he seems to be incapable of smiling but talks a great deal.”45

  Joseph Story, soon to be a Supreme Court judge, went to several of the Madison receptions. He thought the president felt like a duck out of water at social events. He said that Madison at parties “has grace and s
ober character and retired life lead him far from the pleasantries of a coterie.” Many who met him described him sarcastically. “She looks like an Amazon; he like one of the puny knights of Lilliputia,” sneered one.46

  Historian Gaillard Hunt, who edited Madison's papers and probably knew him better than most scholars, agreed. “He was an old, sour eyed man” when he became president, Hunt wrote. “There was never any dash or fire of youth in him.” But yet, Hunt said, as everybody who knew the president when he was in office remarked that there were two James Madisons.

  “His charm was unassailable,” Hunt wrote, and he added that he had hazel eyes that twinkled and a voice that could be very animated. Madison was, to those who knew him well, “an inexhaustible mine of information, frank, communicative.” And, too, they all added, he had “good teeth” and a “nice smile.”47

  Catharine Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams, met Madison just after he was inaugurated. She was struck by his size, like everybody else. “Mr. Madison was a very small man in his person, with a very large head,” she said, but quickly added that he was an unassuming man with a “lively, often playful conversation.”48

  Part of his problem, too, some said, was that his wife was so charismatic, so stylish, and so personable that whenever she was in the room with the president, she always overwhelmed him. That was fine with her husband, but it made it difficult for him to establish himself when in a crowd with his wife. Mrs. Adams noticed that, too. “There was a frankness and ease in her deportment that won golden opinions from all, and she possessed an influence so decided with her little man,” she said.49

  And, too, Madison followed Jefferson into office. Jefferson was leaving in glory as the man who annexed all of the Louisiana Territory and defeated the Barbary pirates. The end of his second term had been trouble-free and peaceful, and Madison was coming into a term that might lead the nation into a war with England. British writer Harriet Martineau, who met Madison years later, wrote that if he had not followed Jefferson in office, he might have been considered a great president.50